Has there been any info on what would be use for the lunar landing portion?

Altair back from the dead?

NASA's notional mission sequence sees the DSG in NRHO primarily as a staging area for the Deep Space Transport to make a 300-400-day "shakedown" cruise followed by a transit of the Mars system. Crewed spacecraft to the lunar surface are not in the picture. Likely partners on the DSG, like ESA, may have more lunar surfaced-focused ideas.

Has there been any info on what would be use for the lunar landing portion?

Altair back from the dead?

There are currently no plans for landing on the lunar surface. The current raison d'etre for the DSG is to field-test tech for going to Mars and being the assembly location for a future Mars transit spacecraft.

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I suspect any lander is going to be halfway between the Apollo LM and the size of Altair. And if NASA can't get the funding; perhaps an ESA/JAXA consortium could be asked to build it. But then; they have to get funding appropriations approved, too! The other option is to ask Commercial Space - including the big guys Boeing/LockMart/Northrop-Grumman - to compete for the contract. I'd love to see Elon's proposal, assuming he was even interested.

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I suspect any lander is going to be halfway between the Apollo LM and the size of Altair. And if NASA can't get the funding; perhaps an ESA/JAXA consortium could be asked to build it. But then; they have to get funding appropriations approved, too! The other option is to ask Commercial Space - including the big guys Boeing/LockMart/Northrop-Grumman - to compete for the contract. I'd love to see Elon's proposal, assuming he was even interested.

ESA, in particular, seems more interested in lunar surface activity. At some point, there will be a "fork in the road" for DSG partners if NASA still champions Mars first and the Europeans head for the lunar surface.

I suspect any lander is going to be halfway between the Apollo LM and the size of Altair. And if NASA can't get the funding; perhaps an ESA/JAXA consortium could be asked to build it. But then; they have to get funding appropriations approved, too! The other option is to ask Commercial Space - including the big guys Boeing/LockMart/Northrop-Grumman - to compete for the contract. I'd love to see Elon's proposal, assuming he was even interested.

Achieving an early milestone in human space exploration by launching the Power Propulsion Element in 2022 using a commercial launch vehicle

I thought this PPE was to be co-manifested on EM-2.

As far as I know, that has been the official plan, but from when I first heard about DSG, I never thought that it was something that needed SLS to support it. It seemed like if designed right it could be done with just commercial vehicles. I don't expect SLS to last long enough to build up the DSG if it flies at all after EM-1, so it is good to hear that this is being considered.

I listened to part of a recent presentation from SNC about NextStep 2 (see here), and I was pleased to hear that they are designing all of their elements to fit in an EELV 5m fairing.